The Story of Maggie Bozeman

This week on the Stay Talking Ish podcast we share an interview we did with the daughter of Maggie Bozeman.

In 1979, Pickens County(Alabama) officials accused Maggie Bozeman and her longtime friend Julia Wilder of casting absenteeballots for 39 senior residents without their permission. All-white state-court juries convicted both black women of vote fraud. Bozeman and Wilder denied any wrongdoing, and the convictions sparked national outrage.

When the two were jailed in 1982, civil rights activists organized a procession from Montgomery to the Pickens county courthouse of Carrollton. Bozeman and Wilder spent fifteen days in prison and ten months in a work-release center before being paroled. the combination of pressure from protesters and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, also as media coverage, brought attention to the case—and, ultimately, a federal choose threw out the cases against both.